Abstract
Sanxingdui is a Bronze Age culture, spread in the last quarter of the II millennium BC on a plain in the vicinity of Chengdu, the administrative centre of the Sichuan Province in China. Almost all Sanxingdui bronzes known before 2020 came from two sacrificial pits: JK1 and JK2, discovered on the territory of the eponymous settlement in 1986. Of all the finds in Sanxingdui sacrificial pits, numerous bronze anthropomorphic sculptures have always attracted the most attention, while zoomorphic figurines were usually neglected. In the first sacrificial pit JK1, zoomorphic images are present in two forms: a high relief on the body of the
zun
bronze vessel presenting three tigers and a bronze figurine of one cat. The second sacrificial pit JK2 lacks any bronze cats or tigers. Two more bronze tigers were found at the Sanxingdui site outside the sacrificial pits, one in 1984 and another in 1995. They were made like turquoiseencrusted flat bronze plaques and to the author’s opinion represent leopards. In 2020, excavations at Sanxingdui that had been previously put on hold in 1986, were resumed and six more sacrificial pits were found. One of them, the JK8 sacrificial pit, yielded two cat figurines looking much the same but differing from leopards, tigers and cats previously found at Sanxingdui. Both figurines show jumping cats landing on their fore legs. The author argues that they present Chinese mountain cat.